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Comment by sqircles | Hacker News Reader

I have long held a bias of KDE being the clunky and slow option from trial in the ~early-oughts. Within the past month or so I installed it to give it a spin and haven't switched back to XFCE since. It strikes a good balance of customization / speed / taste / and just working out of the box. Thanks KDE team!

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If you are someone that mostly likes the Windows 7/10 experience, KDE out of the box is basically that. It's more customizable. It's (IMO) less clunky and less burdened by legacy components. But it really just feels like windows used to feel like.

But also just fast and low memory. You can run KDE on ancient hardware. If you have something like 512MB of ram, you can do KDE just fine.

>If you have something like 512MB of ram, you can do KDE just fine

The past is a foreign land. Minimum memory requirement for Windows 95 was something like 4MB. I ran OS/2 on 8MB of memory (with a Cyrix 40Mhz 486 clone).

At least part of this is going to be the resolutions at play. In windows 95 era you were dealing with 640x480 resolutions. Maybe 1024x768. Modern displays are doing a lot more than that. 1920x1080 at a minimum.

Beyond that, in windows 95 in the extreme you could be looking at only 16 colors. 256 colors was also not uncommon. 16bit colors became common in the windows 98 era.

1024x768 was super common place. 800x600 next in line. I would say that 640x480 was uncommon for Windows 95. I had been running 24-bit graphics with Windows 3.1. No way that 16 bit color only became popular with Windows98. Even SVGA 1027x768x8 was limited to 256 distinct color on the screen at a time, but the palette was dynamic, and the lookup table was into 18-bit RGB space.

I must be doing something wrong. On my old i5 6200u Laptop with 8 gigs of RAM fedora kde takes ages to boot and system operation is definitely more sluggish than Windows 10 used to be.

Are you using an SSD? That does make a pretty big difference.

Also, make sure you are setup to use proprietary firmware. IDK if fedora does that by default. For my laptop I was running without it for a bit and things were definitely a bit sluggish. I had to add some modprobe settings for the i915 (intel video card) driver.

For your CPU it'd look something like this

    # /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
    options i915 enable_guc=2 enable_fbc=1

(might be guc=3)

You'll need to make sure you have the linux-firmware package installed.

(Some googling suggest fedora isn't doing this for you).

Here's an arch wiki entry about it with a bunch of extra diagnostics commands.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics

Here's a gist that also covers fedora

https://gist.github.com/Brainiarc7/aa43570f512906e882ad6cdd8...

Thank you very much for the detailed reply

> But also just fast and low memory.

In my experience it's fast and low memory right up until you go to edit a panel or add a widget. The editor runs like molasses on my desktop.

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